'Watching My Country Essentially Commit Suicide'

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on watching the end of the empire

Suicide of Marcus Brutus, slayer of Caesar

“It’s really strange to be saying this at the age I am, and coming to the end of my days, and watching my country essentially commit suicide.”
—Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

I want to feature the opening of this conversation between Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Glenn Diesen on Diesen’s often-excellent podcast. The video is below. A transcript of the opening section (lightly edited) appears at the end of this piece.

Wilkerson’s Journey

Wilkerson makes points that regular readers will recognize as constants here — the existence of twin coups, both bipartisan, and the unique position of President Trump as “the man who ripped off the mask,” not just from our cruel neoliberalism (witness ICE), but also our cruel foreign policy (witness Gaza and everything else).

What’s interesting to me, though, is that it’s Wilkerson saying all this, and he says it so well.

Consider this section. (I’ve edited it lightly, since Wilkerson tends to speak in parentheticals. See the full quote in the transcript.)

First of all, no one counted on […] this character we have at the head of our government right now. No one counted on the situation that is becoming, I think, rather dire for the American empire, being so accelerated, deepened, and made more profound by, I’m going to say it, not just a mercurial, strange, in some ways showing signs of deep dementia, grifter president with almost complete power because of a juncture of what I call the National Security State [and] the Predatory Capitalist State.

And of all things, we have in those two state-building efforts, since 1945 in particular […] what you have now is crossovers in these two states.

This observation is accurate: A mercurial, strange, demented grifter president now has near-complete power over the conjugation of two powerful states within the State, each of which has its own bipartisan life — the National Security State, and the Predatory Capitalist State.

These states rule us, they will continue to rule us until the structure that holds them up falls — that structure is greed and money, by the way, as Wilkerson points out when discussing the lost moment under Bill Clinton to create a true, peaceful, safe multipolar world (21:55 and following).

I know these ideas aren’t new to Wilkerson; he’s been saying things like this for a while. But this time he’s particularly striking and poignant.

The Glad and the Sad

Things are not everywhere bad. I’m delighted that Ahmed El-Sayed and his DSA kindred have won. I was crushed when, years ago, AOC went from sit-in queen to Nancy Pelosi’s new friend. For years I’ve wanted a caucus of actual rebels, an Open Rebellion Caucus, to form in the House and Senate, a Tea Party left, people who would burn the toes off each Harry Reid who tried to get their way. People who could take Dennis Kucinich’s plane ride and still tell Obama, “No thanks. Single payer, please.”

Didn’t happen then; Kucinich caved to Obama. Not going to happen now, certainly not in good numbers and certainly not in time, given the climate jackpot coming our way.

It delights me, though, that people are trying. It also delights me that people like Wilkerson — smart, Republican, prominent — Wilkerson and so many others are seeing these facts.

• We’re ruled by predators, our rich, using the inherently coercive nature of states to maintain control.

• They’re building and constantly growing a national security machine second to none — almost science-fictiony in its reach and grasp, almost supernatural in what it can know, certainly pathological in its inhuman goals.

• To dislodge these structures means tearing down and completely rebuilding what we call “this modern life,” from economics to media to the way we build consensus and distribute wealth.

• Addressed or not, this modern world, with its pain and contradictions, cannot be sustained.

• People like Wilkerson, born in 1945, marvel at what their life has bracketed and seen — the start of the Empire almost on the day they arrived, and its end, as their own life expires. It’s a helluva tale.

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Transcript

DIESEN: [Very long opening question, leading to…] I was just wondering do you agree with this assessment, and if so, what are possible pathways for the United States? Let’s start with a massive question shall we? [laughter]

WILKERSON: I do in part agree. But let me let me give a couple of side views if you will.

First of all, no one counted on, in this exposé of the way things usually happen, whether it’s Britain or the United States now, or you could go back to other empires — no one calculated on this character we have at the head of our government right now.

No one counted on the situation that is becoming, I think, rather dire for the American empire, being so accelerated, deepened, and made more profound by, I’m going to say it, not just a mercurial, strange, in some ways showing signs of deep dementia grifter — what what other adjectives could I use? — president with almost complete power because of a juncture of what I call the National Security State and it’s being built since 1945 in particular in its present configuration. (The 1947 National Security Act sort of laid out the outline for it. Harry Truman didn’t like it. He didn’t like the fact Paul Nitze had been associated with it, for sure.)

But that state and then the other state: The other state is the Predatory Capitalist State.

And of all things, we have in those two state-building efforts, since 1945 in particular — they’ve been nascent for our entire 250 plus years; I’d say for 300 years if you want to throw the British in there as a adjunct to it or a teacher of it — what you have now is crossovers in these two states.

You have ExxonMobile, for example, whose prime customer in all the world is the Department of Defense, ExxonMobile being clearly a member of the Predatory Capitalist State, and the Pentagon being the supreme, premier member of the National Security State. And the Pentagon’s the greatest buyer of the product of the ExxonMobiles and others in the capitalist state, the Predatory Capitalist State.

And you have Lockheed Martin with a foot in both camps, as do most of the top six or seven defense contractors. They’re making weapons for the National Security State, but they are very much the most highly paid members of the Predatory Capitalist State.

So you have those two states-building efforts that are crashing together right now since 1945 abourning, crashing together right now. And the whole apparatus is totally misunderstood, maybe not even capable of being understood, and being malused and even in the configuration that they exist malused, by an idiot.

How do you get this? How do you get out of this? How do you get it in the first place? How do you get out of it?

I agree with your your summary though that we are looking at another time where — and I think this is key for people who want to understand the global dynamics — Trump may be deepening them, making them more profound in certain areas, but he ultimately is not in control of these global dynamics nor is anyone else in the West. We can fight and push and so forth like we’re doing, Europe in particular, US in particular, but you can’t control these dynamics because I think they’re inexorable.

And you defined it. It’s too simplistic for me to say it’s the maritime powers versus the continental powers, with for the first time in about 2,000 years, the continental powers showing every bit of their strength and penchant for victory, and the maritime powers basically retreating.

And let me footnote that for just a second and say the very singular, quintessential example of this — maritime powers retreating — is going to be when Iran sinks an aircraft carrier, or whoever does, someone’s going to. Aircraft carriers the capital ship of the maritime conglomeration if you will, mostly in America of course, but others have them — that’s going down. And when it goes down it is to a certain extent going to take the maritime regime with it.

The one reason that they aren’t even approaching Iran is because they’re deadly afraid of crossing that line where Iran will be the country that does it. They’re not Afghanistan. They’re not Syria. They’re not any of these countries you sail up to and send a few cruise missiles in and then say, “Aha, see what I did?”

No, they’re going to knock out one of these capital ships that is the quintessential symbol of the maritime group, if you will, led by the United States of course. And to have added another land power, essentially land power — [Iran’s] got some navy, but Trump has destroyed the whole navy [said sardonically] — but [Iran is] essentially a land power, and it’s a vast land power, size of Western Europe 92, 93 million people, and in a good solid geographic position with lots of natural resources that if they were exploited properly would make it even more powerful; oil and gas aren’t the only things they have — and you’ve added them to Russia and China.

So now your continental powers are not only vast, they stretch across the world. Russia alone, the largest country in the world. Add China to it. Add Iran to it. Now the continental powers are awesome in their potential and in their actual strength. And the American Empire and the maritime powers are receding, and in fact, the other powers in that group don’t really add very much to the maritime element of their power. The only really strong maritime power — and that strength is bleeding away every day — is the United States.

So all to say that in this global struggle that is inexorable, I think, it was just foreordained, if you will, by God and Providence that this power was going to shift back to the East from whence it came 2-3,000 years ago, and China would be the primary magnet — all of that is being contested, of course, but the contest now is bizarre.

And it’s bizarre because of this gentleman — I use that term guardedly — sitting at the top of the American empire and the obeisance that the rest of the establishment, our founding fathers, put together, is paying to him. The latest example of which is the Republicans caved and approved his lawyer as the attorney general, even though he’s already de facto the attorney general. So it wasn’t much of a move.

But we are just taking apart the very domestic fabric of our being, our essence as a state in the world, at the same time [that] we’re waging this contest with an utterly inept leader to wage it.

And I’m not going to say that there’s too many people below him in the legislative or the courts or any of the other parts of the government that are competent enough to take over either. And I’m not even sure there’s anyone competent enough to beat him in an election and to reverse the fortunes, if you will, from that perspective.

So we’re in a pickle, Glenn. We are in a pickle.

And because we did gain so much strength, and we punished so many people in the world, and we destroyed so many civilizations in the world — I mean that — we’re now hated as much as we are, looked at as being crazy, and I don’t know how you how you compensate for that while you try to fix enough so that at least you can go out with a fairly decent ... maybe something like England went out after the 1956 Suez crisis. Not a really good example, but nonetheless it’s the end of empire; Britain had started going down long before that.

I don’t know how you put this in geopolitical terms, in geo-strategic terms, in inexorable-powershift-terms, and deal with what we have in Washington right now. I don’t know how you can take it apart.

He should have been impeached. He should have been relieved of his duties. He should have been frog-marched out of Washington. Indeed, he probably should be in jail. But he’s not. Which on a lower scale demonstrates the inadequacy of our structure right now, and the feebleness of our structure, as well as it’s having atrophied over the 250 years it’s been in place.

I’m reading David McCullough’s “John Adams” for a second time, and I’m finding really interesting comments in there from Adams, Jefferson, Madison, the whole group of them, Hamilton, Washington even. I’m finding interesting comments that I highlight and then draw a line out and write a little marginalia about how that applies to today.

It’s eerie how many of them saw this coming — incoately, but they nonetheless saw it coming, Adams probably because he thought any democracy would kill itself eventually. But others saw it more in the terms I’m using now expressed in their language. Especially when the French Revolution broke out and everybody was kind of, you know, Jefferson was over here — “I love what the French are doing.” And Adam’s over here, saying what Burke was saying — “Watch out. This is a tragedy of the First Order.” And out of that turmoil comes a sort of look into what’s happening today that tells you we ain’t getting out of this. This is the end.

Now, what does that mean?

It doesn’t necessarily mean that America is not a country in the world

[that has] 340 million people and [that’s] trying to coexist, trying to get along. But it does mean our power is through, our world-spanning power is through.

The question is, how do we deal with that in this short term that could be highly destructive, not only of ourselves but others too, and get through it to a flat plane, if you will, that’s reasonably accommodating of our reduced power, and [still] continue as a country.

I don’t know how we do that, Glenn. And that’s really strange to be saying that at the age I am, and coming to the end of my days, and watching my country essentially commit suicide.

[…]

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Oh, thank God.